Should All Learning Professionals Be Blogging?

This is the Learning Circuits Blog’s question of the month.

Well, if one were to go by Guy Kawasaki’s definition of a blogger: “someone with nothing to say writing for someone with nothing to do,” the answer is, perhaps, obvious. Banter apart, what is blogging to a learning professional? Consider some examples.

• To rant at different learning approaches and theories (and the odd individual to boot), a la Donald Clark? Makes for interesting reading, makes you think perhaps, but also makes you wonder sometimes, “is it rant for rant’s sake?”

• To lead you on to different sites and act as a signpost, like Jane Knight does? Most useful for learning professionals.

• To throw ideas on different aspects of learning like Will Thalheimer and Clark Quinn do? Great insights from both these blogs, just love them.

Examples apart, what benefits can a learning professional get through blogging? Here’s my list.

• Enables a loosening of the pen, if you will. The informal nature of the blog lets you write what comes to mind without a magazine article’s requirement for form, structure, fastidiousness... helps you shape your ideas and thoughts. Which perhaps allows for better expression in course of time. (Of course, this is its own disadvantage as well, but let’s not look the gift horse in the mouth.)

• Facilitates an informal interchange of ideas, helps test out ideas, thoughts, hypotheses with fellow professionals. (Assuming you have a regular and interested reader base, of course.

• As an extension of the above, as you start acquiring a reader base, it puts pressure on you to improve yourself.

• Gives a nice public-but-sufficiently-private place to expose new ideas, test them out, and refine them before crystallizing them into magazine articles or even books. (Use your blog readers as guinea pigs, in a sense.

• Get exposed to the views of other learning professionals as and when those thoughts arise. While this sounds like a 101 benefit of blogging, I reckon this has great power in bringing learning professionals together, so the industry gains greater legitimacy in corporate circles.

Considering this and the views some of the others have expressed in response to this question, I would think it’s not a bad idea for learning professionals to blog, though I do think that blogging is not an unmixed blessing. But hey, what the heck, nothing is!

(If I were to change the question and ask “should all informal learning professionals be blogging?” I reckon the answer would be a resounding “Yes.” Jay Cross and Harold Jarche would agree.)